Elizabeth Marquis Mayorca is an MFA candidate in poetry and creative nonfiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She received her BFA in dramatic writing from NYU. She has been a violin instructor for over a decade. Before this, she taught playwriting, poetry, and English as a second language.

Susan Ayres, a poet and translator, is an MFA candidate of Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals. As professor at Texas A&M University School of Law, she researches intersections between law, literature, and culture.

Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection, The Book of Men won The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book, Facts about the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award. She teaches for the Program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty of Pacific University's Low-Residency MFA Program.

Alice Anderson's first poetry collection Human Nature won the NYU Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Associations Best First Book Prize. Her second collection, The Watermark, was published in 2016. A memoir, Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press.